Collections are suddenly gone in DK

Gilles Caulier caulier.gilles at gmail.com
Fri Sep 12 16:52:56 BST 2025


Le ven. 12 sept. 2025 à 12:41, Thomas <sdktda at gmail.com> a écrit :
>
> Hi Maik,
>
> I let DK run for many hours more. It seemed to have found some more
> albums. Up until 2024. But then it stopped.
>
> I have now started and stopped DK multiple times. I have also clicked
> Refresh on the Albums folder. It still does not seem to find the rest of
> the collection.
>
> What might cause this?
>
> Would a reinstall of DK help at all?

Hi,

Typically no.

I'm 99% sure that something in your Windows installation locks the
database or the application or the file system. This introduces giant
time latency in the program. This can be the Windows update running in
background, an antivirus, or a malfunction with your hardware.

Another issue can be the file path scheme name in your collection
which cause dysfunction, eg. no latin1 char encoding for ex, even if
digiKam supports UTF8 and the application manifest for Windows sets
these properties at run time.

In my office we switch from WIN10 to WIN11 progressively on all
desktop computers, and we sometimes see troubles with file paths when
we use company applications (where WIN10 has no problem for a very
long time). This is difficult to investigate and to reproduce. This is
especially true with the network file systems but not with all users.
The reason is not clear...

Best regards

Gilles Caulier

>
>
> BR
>
> Thomas
>
>
> On 2025-09-08 21.20, Thomas wrote:
> > Thank you so much for looking into this!
> >
> > Perhaps I stopped DK too early and thus it did not produce errors in
> > the logs....
> >
> >
> > What I did after I sent you logs was that I started DK and let it run
> > for a long time (it is still running) while producing a new log.
> >
> > It is doing *something*...
> >
> > I guess I can let it run until tomorrow and see if it eventually finds
> > the albums....
> >
> > My collection is hundreds of thousands of photos - > 1 TB. So it will
> > take a long time if it needs to scan through everything....
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On 08/09/2025 20.39, Maik Qualmann wrote:
> >> Thanks for the log, I don't see any problems. The network collections
> >> are
> >> found and are online. The root network albums are being added. At
> >> least the
> >> root album names should appear in the album tree.
> >> I have no idea what's wrong with that; there are no error messages
> >> from the
> >> core DB either.
> >> Could it be that the scroll bars aren't visible for some reason, and the
> >> network collection is below your local album tree? Try
> >> resizing/minimizing the
> >> window?
> >>
> >> Maik
> >>
> >> Am Montag, 8. September 2025, 12:50:43 Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit
> >> schrieb
> >> Thomas:
> >>> It is indeed MacOS on Apple Silicon (M3)
> >>>
> >>> I have sent the log. Not sure how much log to capture. But I just
> >>> started DK and let it run for a few moments. Let me know if you need
> >>> more.
> >>>
> >>> Thanks for looking in to this!
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> BR
> >>>
> >>> Thomas
> >>>
> >>> On 08/09/2025 12.27, Maik Qualmann wrote:
> >>>> It looks like macOS, please send me a debug log from the terminal when
> >>>> starting digiKam to my private email, as described here:
> >>>>
> >>>> https://www.digikam.org/contribute/#macos-host
> >>>>
> >>>> Maik
> >>>>
> >>>> Am Montag, 8. September 2025, 11:38:36 Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit
> >>>> schrieb
> >>>>
> >>>> Thomas:
> >>>>> Hello,
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> I recently recovered from backup and as part of that I recovered
> >>>>> my DK
> >>>>> settings, collections, .db files, etc.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> All that seemed to work just fine for several days.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Now suddenly, when I start DK my collections seem to be gone.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> This scares me a bit as my collections are quite big. And
> >>>>> especially one
> >>>>> of them is more than a decade old and I have put a huge amount of
> >>>>> time
> >>>>> into it.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> When I look at the db files for DK, they do not seem to have reduced
> >>>>> dramatically in size. For example, the thumbnails.db is still tens
> >>>>> of GB
> >>>>> in size. So I do not think everything has been purged. But what would
> >>>>> cause it to suddenly not show up in the UI?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> How do I get my collections back in DK?
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> In DK settings, these are my collections:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> (names and PII redacted for privacy)
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> When I go to Albums module, I only see the Pictures-local album.
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Note, the network volumes /are mounted/ on the specified paths.
> >>
> >>
> >>


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